Blog

Compliance

Have you already implemented an offence prevention system for your company?

Compliance ad intra: the tool to avoid the commission of a crime of misappropriation or / and unfair administration.

In a recent Judgment (136/2018 of June 28), the Spanish Supreme Court has had a new opportunity to rule on regulatory compliance programs. On this occasion, it has outlined an aspect we had already advanced in our Compliance programs analysis, which we value as one of the most practical aspects of compliance protocols in businesses (including, administration owned Corporations): to ensure that a company, in particular, its directors and administrators, comply with the applicable regulatory framework, even if their only motivation is avoiding problems of legal breach.

That is: by establishing and implementing an effective mechanism for detecting, correcting and preventing legal risks, the company can be exempted from criminal liability. In addition, this tool is essential to avoid the commission of crimes by the administrative departments, such as those referred to in the judgment (misappropriation or unfair administration), since it hinders the execution of behaviors or actions constituting these offenses.

In this sense, the cited sentence reflects:

“… a good corporate practice in the company is to implement these regulatory compliance programs that guarantee that this type of actionsis not committed, or hinder the continued behavior of distraction of money, or abuse of functions that a good regulatory compliance program would have immediately detected … At least, a compliance system bears in the mind of the potential Director/offender that there is a control mechanism in place”.

We are pleased to hear this statement from the Supreme Court. Once again, good corporate governance is linked to the avoidance of criminal offenses within companies.